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How Are You Managing Your Time?

As Joe Mathews, Don Debolt and Deb Percival write in their article titled, 10 Time-Management Tips That Work, “Before you can even begin to manage time, you must learn what time is. A dictionary defines time as ‘the point or period at which things occur.’ Put simply, time is when stuff happens.

There are two types of time: clock time and real time. In clock time, there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year. All time passes equally. In real time, all time is relative. Time flies or drags depending on what you’re doing.”

The article goes into talking about how you use the time you’ve got. Are you watching the clock constantly or are you just going through the day and getting done what you set out to do? We all have days that are full of meetings and those that drag on, especially during the holiday season.

I manage my time with the help of NUMEROUS to-do lists. I’ve got one for all of my projects, one for a particular list of projects, one for 30/60/90 days projects and another for things that just pop up. Is that crazy? Maybe, but I know what I’m setting out to accomplish each day. Thinking that you have something to achieve, regardless of how big or small, in the next two months might be overwhelming and sometimes makes you think you’ve got a ton of time to do it in. When in reality, those hour days all blur into one continuum and unless you have accomplishments along the way, you may never get around to your final task.

I think that by far my most favorite quote from the article is the following: “There are only three ways to spend time: thoughts, conversations and actions.”

How are you spending your time, and more importantly, what did you do today?